Yesterday one of the ranges where I RSO sponsored a half-day seminar on non-lead ammo, and I was asked to back up the rangemaster so had an excellent view of the event. There are a few takeaways, it's a limited number of datapoints but more than I had a few days ago so sharing here.
The event was led by a National Park Service biologist whose job is to cull invasive wildlife... mostly feral pigs... from parks. There were also several biologists present from the local tribal Condor release program in addition to mostly older local hunters. That set up an interesting cultural moment, because a few of the younger (20s) seasonal biologists were pretty diverse, and one had blue hair. Because everyone shared an interest in shooting, all got along very well.
After a safety moment, there was a brief lecture by the NPS guy. Then he shot lead and non-lead for accuracy, with essentially no difference in his Tikka T3x 308 (with the usual caveat that every rifle is unique and two otherwise identical rifles might prefer different loads). Then, he shot both into 10% ballistic gel. Not much difference in penetration, but a very obvious difference between a clear non-lead bullet track and a lead bullet that left a surprising amount of dark fine particulate and very visible lead behind. There was a lot of background conversation happening in the audience about not really wanting to eat that lead.
The NPS guy offered me an opportunity to try a variety of loads in my rifle. We met at the range this morning. Background: I have a lot of experience using non-lead in lighter calibers to cull local invasive wildlife, which we're sometimes required to do by our project permits. In my case that's been smaller stuff so my experience is from 22 LR up to 6.5 Grendel, but nothing larger than that. The smaller stuff has been accurate and effective for me. Today we shot 308 Win out of my Remington 700, which is capable of sub-MOA groups with (lead) 175 SMK handloads if I do my job.
I tried six different non-lead loads. The best 100-yard group of the day was 0.615 with Federal 150gr Copper, the more economical Federal load; it slightly outshot the Federal Premium 150gr Trophy load, which came in at 0.912. A 130gr Barnes Vor-TX TTSX load came in at 1.933, although that was my fault pulling one of those left, the rest of the group was inside an inch. A Sig Sauer 150gr load came in at 0.942. Hornady Superperformance 165gr CX was 0.990, but Hornady Outfitter 165gr CX opened up to 2.736 and there were no called fliers on that one, pretty sure it really was the ammo especially since others said it hadn't grouped well for them either.
One group with each load isn't the best sample size, it's what we had time for and what I was comfortable shooting with someone else's ammo, even if my federal tax dollars did help pay for it. Still, five groups out of six under an inch, while the NPS guy and two RSO's were hovering off to the side in my peripheral vision, and that 0.615 might be the best group I've shot with that particular rifle. I'm pretty happy with that.
After packing up I asked some questions about handgun loads, and in this case there was limited info to be had. Mostly we talked about generalities. As some of you know various threads on P-F have focused partially on penetration especially with hardcast or other solids. The NPS guy, having shot a whole lot of pigs, says he prefers non-lead hollow points which fully open. Most of those have been centerfire rifle in various calibers, but he does carry a 9mm pistol as a backup and has shot more than a few pigs with it. He says Barnes 115gr +p TAC-XP has been very effective on head shots. For me that's important information, because most of what I'm likely to encounter in this area is thinner skinned than an adult pig.
Several of us plan to stay in contact and trade information on effectiveness of various loads. A potential field trip is being discussed for later this summer.
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Originally Posted by Lester Polfus
Bullfrogs are not native to the west coast, and they eat pretty much anything they can catch and swallow including native frogs and small birds. This particular population was associated with a large creek and they were exceptionally wary. The load used was CCI Copper-22, "21 grain small game." Box rating is 1,850 fps. I was running it through a Browning Buckmark, so probably less than that in this case. Use of a pistol was because this was an oh-by-the-way opportunistic effort while we were doing other more important things, and I needed hands free to climb steep rocky slopes on a very rugged and remote site, photo document, run a GPS, take field notes, etc.
